This past Sunday, I had an opportunity for which I've been waiting my entire adult life -- I got to go see Bob Dylan in concert. The event was disappointing on so many levels. Bob is 60 now, and I had not realized, just from his last few albums, just how his voice had deteriorated. There's a reason he sticks to the gravelly backroad stuff these days -- his voice can't do the strained, passionate vitriol that we think of when we think of Bob Dylan anymore. The few "classic" Dylan songs he played -- I remember hearing "Lay Lady Lay", "Rainy Day Women," "Like a Rolling Stone," "Tangled Up in Blue," "Blowin' in the Wind," and a really ill-advised "All Along the Watchtower" -- he delivered in a hushed, rushed growl, blowing through the verses and often garbling the choruses.
The show was about a week after my 28th birthday. I couldn't help but think, sitting there watching him play that passionless "All Along the Watchtower", that I was now older than Jimi Hendrix ever got. And Janis Joplin. And Jim Morrison. And Hank Williams. And Kurt Cobain...
I found myself thinking that if Bob Dylan had died in the "rock star death year" we would still have "Blonde on Blonde," we'd still have "Highway 61 Revisited," we'd still have "John Wesley Harding." We would have missed "Blood on the Tracks," though. I wondered if it might not have just been better if he'd burned out rather than fading away...
And it occurs to me that you can't judge the worth of a man's life by the art he produces... only he can truly know his life's meaning. And it occurs to me that despite what I wanted to hear when he took the stage, he is still the man who wrote some of the greatest songs of the twentieth century, and he still knows those songs better than I ever will (even if I remember the lyrics better than he does). Somewhere inside, he is still Bob Dylan, I guess. He must be. And even though the overwhelming feeling in my mind at the time was that he should have packed it in long ago, he knows his life better than I ever could, and he knows why he hasn't. Of all his faults, he has never been accused of leading an unexamined life.
I only hope when my time comes, and I'm no longer good at whatever it is I end up being good at, I know when to call it quits.